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Teaching Gifted Students with D&D Posted by WJWalton on Fri 17 of June, 2011 09:47 PDT

The Austin Daily Herald brings us this story on the third annual Gifted and Talented Symposium in Austin, Texas, where Educational Psychology professor Bonnie Cramond discussed her methods of using Dungeons & Dragons to teach mythology to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders:

Cramond brought the fantasy game presentation to the symposium, ready to explain how in the early ‘80s she used a barebones version of Dungeons and Dragons to get middle school students to work together and absorb the material in a different way.

Cramond split the students into groups, introduced the game and got them started on an adventure based on the 12 labors of Hercules. She didn’t make students read about Hercules beforehand, however. She simply set the textbooks on a shelf, which students eventually discovered. To Cramond’s delight, the students read the myths in order to gain an advantage in the game, figuring out what they needed to do to pass.

“They thought they were tricking me,” she said with a smile.

Sadly, most of these sorts of creative learning programs were shut out during the Satanic Panic era of the 1980s, when many parents were filled with the fear that anything related to role-playing games was evil and dangerous.

Thankfully however, we are past that era, and most people have a fair to good understanding about what RPGs really are. Now it's just a matter of spreading the word of how beneficial RPGs can be to the learning process, and trying to put programs like this one back into place in schools everywhere.

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